Here lies the Eric Adams mayoralty

For what may be the last time, New York City Mayor Eric Adams gave a formal address in the City Hall rotunda Tuesday, attempting to write the headline of his own legacy. “Unfiltered, perfectly imperfect,” the mayor said. “I am just Eric, and probably in the history of time as mayor, so many mayors want to be filtered. They wanted to pretend who they are and act like they are perfect. I am not.”

Press conferences have become increasingly rare in City Hall, and Tuesday’s event had a ring of finality. Adams walked out to a new audio reel highlighting his speeches and played an animated video depicting his rise from a difficult childhood plagued by poverty and dyslexia. He and his top officials filled and buried a time capsule with objects representing accomplishments as varied as settling labor contracts, sheltering hundreds of thousands of migrants, expanding after school programs, containerizing trash and building housing. 

The mood was mostly celebratory, but as officials shoveled dirt onto the sealed box, it was difficult not to see a funeral. And with just two weeks left in office, Adams is off to Mexico on Tuesday night, the Daily News reported, marking his fourth international trip since October, in addition to other domestic travel since the election. He did not say when he would be coming back. A City Hall spokesperson told City & State that it is “not an official trip,” after Adams told another reporter the trip was “none of your business.”

The city’s 111th mayor and its second Black mayor, Adams was surrounded on Tuesday by his “generals,” the stalwarts who he said made history alongside him over the past four years. That includes top lieutenants and loyalists like First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, Deputy Mayor for Administration Camille Joseph-Varlack, communications chief Fabien Levy and Budget Director Jacques Jiha, as well as at least one agency leader who will stay on in Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s administration, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. He thanked in particular the officials – including Mastro and Deputy Mayor for Housing, Economic Development and Workforce Adolfo Carrión Jr. – who joined the highest ranks of his administration at one of its lowest points.

Time capsule cavity is ready, there is a plaque https://t.co/ndy84RZKnR pic.twitter.com/WCOID0cjle

— Holly Pretsky (@hollypret) December 16, 2025

The people on the steps of the rotunda represented a skeleton crew of people elevated to top roles after others were fired or resigned. Absent from the press conference were many of the people who helped cement Adams’ legacy – both the good and the bad. His erstwhile closest allies who became entangled in the corruption scandals and investigations that precluded his second term: Ingrid Lewis-Martin, Timothy Pearson, Winnie Greco and Phil Banks, were not present. Nor were the bureaucrats who authored some of his biggest achievements only to later resign in protest: Maria Torres-Springer, Meera Joshi and Anne Williams-Isom.

Adams said his legacy is often defined by the fact that he was the first sitting mayor in modern history to be indicted. But he asked New Yorkers to remember the other ways he differed from his predecessors. “How about the first mayor to have visited Rikers Island and speak to inmates? ... The first mayor that did dyslexia screening, the first mayor to bring down crime to the record levels that we have, the first mayor to build more housing than any mayor in history.” 

He made some veiled references to his successor, and none too generous. Mamdani has said he will end the practice of forcibly clearing homeless encampments. Tuesday, Adams said, “We overhauled our city's approach to homelessness, and finally he got New Yorkers with serious mental illness the help and health care they needed. There is nothing dignified about walking past people living on the streets. I don't care what anyone states.”

Adams then moved to literally cement his legacy, burying a time capsule filled with the symbolic items chosen by each of his top deputies. Joseph-Varlack chose an ID card for the Roosevelt Hotel, the home base of the administration’s response to the influx of more than 200,000 migrants and asylum-seekers since 2022. Carrión Jr. chose a key to represent the citywide rezoning known as City of Yes. Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Kaz Daughtry chose a piece from one of the city’s many drones, representative of their embrace of new technologies.

For his own item, Adams held up a vinyl record in a sleeve mocked up with a “record” of his successes, including some very simplified ones, like “record safety” and “record jobs.”

After the press conference Tuesday, Adams and his team marched outside to bury the objects just outside the east gate of City Hall. A plaque affixed to the gate just above it reads “Adams Administration Time Capsule Buried Here. January 1, 2022 – December 31, 2025.”